The anti-bailout
government of Greece’s new leftist prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, has been
announced, with the post of economics minister - chief negotiator with the
country’s international creditors - going to a radical economist who has
described austerity programmes as “fiscal waterboarding”.
The rest of the
government, the first in Europe to openly oppose the bailout conditions
demanded by the European Union and International Monetary Fund, was announced
by the newly installed minister of state, Nikos Pappas, on Tuesday afternoon.
There are 39 cabinet
members in total, of whom six are women, with academics taking up a number of
key cabinet posts.
Tsipras chose
economist and veteran leftwing politician Giannis Dragasakis as deputy prime
minister, responsible for overseeing negotiations with the “troika” of the
European Commission, the IMF and the ECB.
Panos Kammenos, party
leader of coalition partner the Independent Greeks, has been made Defence
minister, while the blind MP Panaghiotis Kouroumblis will helm the health
ministry. The cabinet was being sworn in on Tuesday afternoon.
One of Vardoulakis’s
top priorities will be to deliver on Tsipras’s election pledge to renegotiate
the terms of Greece’s €240bn bailout deal, despite widespread and sometimes
forceful opposition from other European countries, led by Germany.
Varoufakis, 53,
studied in Britain and has also taught in Australia, Greece and the US. In
pre-election interviews he promised to end what he described as Greece’s
humanitarian crisis, slice a chunk off its €320bn debt mountain, and destroy
the country’s oligarchs who “viciously suck the energy and the economic power
from everybody else”.
A prolific blogger and
media commentator who dresses in brightly colored shirts and jeans, Varoufakis
– who has dual Greek and Australian nationality – abandoned a job at the
University of Texas to join Tsipras’s team in the election run up, and
celebrated Sunday’s result by paraphrasing Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, saying:
“Greek democracy today chose to stop going gently into the night. Greek
democracy resolved to rage against the dying of the light.”
Syriza failed by just
two seats to win an outright majority in Greece’s 300-seat parliament and on
Monday formed a coalition government with the small rightwing Independent
Greeks (Anel) party.
Analysts have
described it as an unnatural alliance and warned it might not survive long,
pointing out that ANEL - best-known for vitriolic attacks on Germany and the
Troika and for the occasional unashamedly anti-Semitic, racist and homophobic
outbursts of its populist leader, Panos Kammenos – are unpredictable and that
the two parties, while they agree on the need to end austerity, hold directly
opposing views on many key social issues including immigration.
While the IMF said it
was ready to continue supporting Greece and looked forward to discussions with
the new government, the head of the European commission, Jean-Claude Juncker,
warned that a reduction in the country’s debt was “not on the radar”. The EU issued
a stiff statement that Greece would risk its place in the eurozone if it fails
to meet its austerity and debt commitments.
Syriza has promised to
reverse many of the huge public-sector spending cuts and wage and pension
reductions implemented by the previous centre-right government, but several
eurozone countries made clear they thought its plans were unrealistic.
“In our view it is
important for the new government to take action to foster Greece’s continued
economic recovery,” Steffen Seibert, a spokesman for the German chancellor,
Angela Merkel’, said. “That also means Greece sticking to its previous
commitments.”
The British Prime
Minister, David Cameron, was more conciliatory on Monday night, congratulating
Tsipras and welcoming his “intention to tackle corruption and increase tax
transparency across Greece”.
But the UK chancellor,
George Osborne, said Syriza’s promises to voters appeared “very difficult to
deliver” and “incompatible with what the eurozone currently demands”, warning
that any resulting uncertainty would have an impact on Britain.
Varoufakis has long criticized
Europe’s handling of the economic crisis, attacking the conservative economic
orthodoxy that demands budget rigor and market-friendly structural reforms.
That approach amounted
to “a cynical transfer of banking losses on to the shoulders of the weakest
taxpayers”, he said on his blog earlier this month. He has also likened the
tough terms of bailout deals to “fiscal waterboarding” that risked converting
southern Europe into “a form of Victorian workhouse”.
